Overview and CQC Inspections

OverallRequires improvement

Our inspector's description of this service

Last updated 30 July 2015

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital is an established 488 bed general hospital which serves a population of approximately 240,000 people, from West and North Norfolk as well as Breckland, Cambridgeshire and South Lincolnshire. The trust provides a comprehensive range of specialist, acute, obstetrics, palliative care for cancer patients and other chronic illnesses and community-based services.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) carried out a scheduled focused inspection at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital Kings Lynn between the 9 and 11 June 2015. The trust had been placed into special measures in October 2013 due to serious failings and had undergone a full comprehensive inspection in July 2014 where we rated the trust as requires improvement. The trust was not compliant with regulation 11, safeguarding and regulation 13 for medicine management. We carried out the focused inspection in 2015 to review services that had been previously rated as requires improvement or inadequate and to consider the current status of the trust in relation to special measures.

Inspection ratings

We rate most services according to how safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led they are, using four levels:

Outstanding – the service is performing exceptionally well.

Good – the service is performing well and meeting our expectations.

Requires improvement – the service isn't performing as well as it should and we have told the service how it must improve.

Inadequate – the service is performing badly and we've taken enforcement action against the provider of the service.

No rating/under appeal/rating suspended – there are some services which we can’t rate, while some might be under appeal from the provider. Suspended ratings are being reviewed by us and will be published soon.

Ticks and crosses

We don't rate every type of service. For services we haven't rated we use ticks and crosses to show whether we've asked them to take further action or taken enforcement action against them.

There's no need for the service to take further action. If this service has not had a CQC inspection since it registered with us, our judgement may be based on our assessment of declarations and evidence supplied by the service.

The service must make improvements.

At least one standard in this area was not being met when we inspected the service and we have taken enforcement action.